The new National Museum of China occupies a huge building with a colonnaded facade overlooking Tiananmen Square, opposite the Mao Zedong mausoleum. After three years of renovation and extension work, its 192,000 square metres of exhibition space is supposed to give the People's Republic a museum in keeping with its international standing. Only the Louvre in Paris (210,000 square metres) is larger.

It opened to the public in March, with free admission, but only 8,000 visitors a day are allowed to see the permanent exhibition. So the Chinese turn up early in the morning to see the rooms devoted to national resurrection, ancient bronzes, Chinese porcelain and statues of the Buddha. The rooms on ancient China have just opened.

The task of converting this gigantic Stalinist structure, dating from 1959, and redesigning its entrance hall and exhibition spaces, was given to a German firm of architects, Gerkan, Mark & Partners, better known for railway stations, airports and sports stadiums. History museums all over China have been pressed to dispatch some of their greatest treasures to the capital.

But despite its facelift the institution's prime mission is still patriotic education, fashioning and interpreting Chinese history to serve the party line. A perfect illustration is the permanent exhibition entitled The Path to National Resurrection. It starts with the period of humiliation to which western colonial powers subjected China, highlighting the steps on the way to nationalist reawakening and modernisation, with the foundation of the first republic.

The sections focusing on the People's Republic, established when Mao seized power in 1949, take visitors through the key moments in the history of the Communist party, culminating in the economic achievements of recent years, with the conquest of space, fast trains to Tibet and the Olympic Games.

A smiling Mao appears in just one photograph, talking to party members in 1961 after the disastrous experiment with the Great Leap Forward, which caused the deaths of millions of Chinese. Two others allude to the Cultural Revolution, but fail to mention its atrocities. The only picture relating to the events of 1989, in the square outside, is dated 9 June and shows Deng Xiaoping congratulating the troops enforcing martial law.

"I was surprised to see there is so little detail," said a young biology student, Li, born in 1987. "Some of our teachers talk about Tiananmen and we all look on the net," she added. This mutilated history "infuriates" Yang Jisheng, a former journalist at the Xinhua news agency and author of a monumental study of the great famine, which is banned in China. "Those of us who are familiar with the history avoid this sort of museum. Historical facts have been perverted. The refusal to talk about the past is a bit like plugging your ears while you steal a bell, convinced that no one else will hear," he said.

The concepts of reawakening and regeneration are particularly upsetting, Yang adds. "They refer to periods when China was supposedly glorious. But which period should we consider: the first emperor, the Tang or the Qin dynasty? And which aspects should we retain of these periods, which were after all dictatorships?"

In these days of keen rivalry between the world's great museums, the Beijing show highlights a contradiction deep-rooted in the People's Republic: the first exhibition loaned by a foreign organisation is devoted to the Art of Enlightenment. Thanks to this master-stroke of German diplomacy, Chinese visitors can enjoy 600 works of 18th-century art from museums in Berlin, Munich and Dresden.

At the opening of the exhibition on 1 April, the German foreign minister, Guido Westerwelle, spoke of the ideals expressed by art, such as respect for human dignity, the rule of law and individual freedoms. Such ideas, he added, led to the fall of the Berlin wall, but the Chinese media made no mention of his comments.

Other museums in Europe are thinking about staging shows here too, and the Louvre is already involved in a joint project. The luxury goods group LVMH has started talks about an exhibition on the Vuitton brand and travel. It is slated to occupy four rooms and last two or three months, according to the LVMH spokesperson in Shanghai.

With its prestige, ambitious aims and vast exhibition space begging to be filled, museums from all over the world are courting the Chinese mogul. But this may not be a simple task. As one expert said: "The editorial line of Chinese museums is not always crystal clear."